Regenerative Medicine
The Cambridge SENS Foundation project.
Regenerative medical therapies are ones that rebuild or repair the body, rather than trying to ‘reset’ its control systems (like drugs) or get rid of diseased bits (like surgery).
Most regenerative medicine focuses on stem cells, but this is not the limit of the regenerative medicine idea. Our approach to regenerative medicine treats the body as a chemical system, and looks at where that has gone wrong and how we might ‘patch’ it to fix it. I am working on applying regenerative medicine to those diseases and disabilities of old age that are caused by the ageing process iself (rather than by specific mutations, as in cancer, or infections, or specific diet-gene interactions as in diabetes or heart disease). This is in part because the disability of old age is the number one economic problem facing Western societies today (the pension crisis is only part of this). It is in part because I have seen relatives decline from being fascinating, active friends to incapable dependents who would rather not be alive, and I do not want that to happen to anyone else (see here for the very funny but devastating Mitchell and Webb illustration of this). And in part because I want to be alive when the first spacecraft to GJ581 sends its results back home.